Language and Logic

The tendency of a part of the historiographic tradition, above in the United Kingdom and USA, to refuse the historical-critical based methodology promoted a reading of medieval philosophy inspired by analytic philosophy, which gave priority to developments in logic and semantics and in turn their application to broad problematic fields such as metaphysics, physics, ethics, etc. This interpretative school produced innovative research above all in the fields of logic (where those aspects which seem to anticipate developments in contemporary formal logic are stressed), semantics, natural philosophy, and, more recently, various studies inspired by the philosophy of the mind. With respect to handbooks, this interpretive trend favored a renewed systematic method (with strong attention being paid to logic and a disciplinary approach), and is apparent in the innovative, though debated, manual The Cambridge History of Late Medieval Philosophy. Among the most influential writers of this type of scholarship are Ian Pinborg and Lambert-Marie De Rijk.